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Current and Recent Mind and Life News Releases
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New Jon Kabat-Zinn Book — January 4, 2005
Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness is now available at bookstores and online. The author is Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., vice chairman of the Mind and Life Institute.
Coming to Our Senses is a follow-up to the widely praised national bestseller Wherever You Go, There You Are. In his latest book, Kabat-Zinn shows us how the power of mindfulness can bring radical change to our lives.
Kabat-Zinn is the founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, as well as Professor of Medicine emeritus. He leads workshops on stress reduction and mindfulness for doctors and other health professionals and for lay audiences worldwide. He is the bestselling author of Wherever You Go, There You Are and Full Catastrophe Living, and, with his wife Myla Kabat-Zinn, Everyday Blessings, a book on mindful parenting. With Dr. Andrew Weil he created the CD program Meditation for Optimum Health. He was featured in the PBS series Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers, as well as on Oprah. He lives in Massachusetts.
Here is a brief overview of the book. To learn more about the book and the author, plus order the book online, click on www.amazon.com
Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness
Jon Kabat-Zinn. Hyperion, $24.95 (640p) ISBN 0-7868-6756-6
"For any of us, perhaps our greatest potential regret may be that of not seizing the moment and honoring it for what it is when it is here," writes bestselling author Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living; Wherever You Go, There You Are; etc.). The scientist who pioneered the use of the Buddhist technique of mindfulness (or moment-by-moment awareness) to help patients cope with the stress and pain of illness arrived at this poignant lesson after seeing the way his father, an eminent immunologist who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, lost all sense of who he was and what was happening to him. In a passionate tour de force that blends personal experience with cutting-edge science (his own and others'), poetry and insights culled from many traditions, Kabat-Zinn sets out to awaken us to the true potential and value of a gift that most of us take for granted: sentience. Our lack of awareness of our impact on the rest of the world amounts to "a kind of auto-immune disease of the earth."
Borrowing an analogy made by the neuroscientist Francisco Varela, Kabat-Zinn compares the way our immune system senses the whole of our bodily self to our potential for a mindful awareness. That is, the practice of cultivating this conscious, heightened sentience leads to the realization of our wholeness, as we begin to realize that we don't live just within the envelope of our own senses, sensations and thoughts but within the whole of all that is. Kabat-Zinn illuminates the many facets of this selfless way of being, not just with Buddhist understanding and verse but with quotes from Einstein ("A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe'"), Dickinson, Rilke and many other Western greats. Ardent, personal, frankly opinionated in places, this book seeks to wake up as individuals and as a culture. It is a treasure trove of contemporary wisdom.
Mind and Life Books
The Mind and Life Institute has published a number of books that you may also want to read. Here is the link to the book section on the Mind and Life website. You may order books from this link as well. www.mindandlife.org/books.pubs_section.html
© Copyright 2007 Mind and Life Institute, Boulder, CO, USA. All rights reserved.
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